About Me

Avid YA and Adult book reader. Trying to spread my love of books through reviews and word of mouth.

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Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Need Series (#3-4) by Carrie Jones

This
series have been a long time coming now – I read the first two books back when
they first came out (almost 8 years ago, omg!) so now that I finally had the
chance to actually finish the series, I’m not at all surprised how much I have
changed as a reader and my expectations have also changed a lot. While I still found the whole pixie thing to
be fascinating as well as the other mythical creatures – shape shifters and
Norse gods, I found the characters and the plot itself to be a little childish
and immature. This definitely included
Zara, Nick, Astley, and company.

For
Zara, her goodness was, at times, too much to handle. She was always trying to save the world. However, in the third book when she was
trying to recover Nick from Valhalla, I found her so incredibly selfish. For someone who was all about peace and
whatnot, she was willing to sacrifice so many people just to get him back. Her friends and family, who were behind her
in her efforts at first until the body count was going too high, started to
discourage her from saving one person by sacrificing many. However, did she listen? No, she still went on and they ended up
finding a solution that they could have easily
found in the beginning and countless lives would have been saved. It was so idiotic and ridiculous to me.

As for
Nick, while I liked him in the first two books, after Zara was turned pixie and
did everything she could to save him, he basically turned on her and rejected
their love for each other. So not only
did Zara sacrifice so many people to get him back, at the end of the day, did
they actually have a happy ending? Not really. I just found the whole ordeal to be a waste
of time and energy and could have been easily avoided. Honestly, I also found Nick to be quite
selfish and he was a bigot to boot. He simply
couldn’t look pass the point that not all pixies are bad and was
indiscriminately racist against them (or should I say specie-ist) and this
included Zara as well.

Astley,
the other character in this book, brought out mixed feelings from me. I wasn’t particularly fond of him in the
beginning but I think he slowly warmed up to me mainly due to the fact that he
actually listened to Zara without trying to tell her to do something or
convince her that she was wrong. At the
same time, sometimes he encouraged her to do something that she shouldn’t have
(i.e. sacrifice people to save Nick). However,
I do think that he genuinely cared for her and while the relationship between him
and Zara was more subtle, I think it was stronger.

To be
honest, I did find the plot to be a little ridiculous at times especially in
book three when Zara went on a crazy mission to find how to get Nick back. She looked at every single corner, traveled
extensively, sacrificed a lot of people close to her, and at the end of the
day, the solution was simple and didn’t end up with anyone dying. Book four also had some crazy aspects to it –
the whole building the army thing made sense but how likely was it that no one
thought about spreading the news and enlisting help from other places as
well. I mean, there is such thing as
social media and viral images/videos these days. There were just a ton of little details that I
thought the author either skipped or brushed off because she couldn’t figure a
way to directly address it.

Overall,
the series was just okay – it wasn’t anything special. I lost interest in Zara and the whole good vs
evil after a while. It just didn’t stick
to me and there are so many better books out there.